Congrats, everyone! We finally did it! And way ahead of schedule! Take that, scientists! They said we couldn’t do it before 2050. They warned us! They scolded us! But look at us now! Eat it, nerds!
I feel like we're in a movie where we are all bickering for petty reasons (namely wars and political polarisation), while in the background-- away from our sight and out of mind-- an abstract, cosmic horror is progressively happening. Preparing to kill us all.
I watched Don't Look Up long ago. But in our real life case, I imagine somehow a far more sinister yet indescribable horrific dark entity conspiring to kill humanity.
I haven't even read any of Lovecraft's work, and yet here I am imagining an indescribable horror lol.
I think now that the real horror is humanity committing a slow collective suicide. We're all trapped by our own ego that we neglect the greater problem.
I looked it up the other day. We crossed 1c in 2015/2016. News stories at the time talked about how 1.5 might happen as early as 2035 if we don’t get our climate act together.
Yikes.
According to several other data sets, 2023 reached 1.5C too. Dramatic record low Arctic sea ice volume throughout the year, and current, including at north pole is ominous for north pole being ice free in next 2 summers.
Don't worry, cheaper solar panels, electric cars and entrepreneurs will save humanity. And by humanity I mean a specific share of the world's developed nations. Discourse on this frustrates me to an unhealthy degree.
If you promote techno-fetishism laden, borderline tech-bro driven or shitass bill gates financed media, please reply so I may wish upon your remaining bloodline an everlasting mildly inconvenient curse.
And if you like Kurzgesagt tech videos, please reply so I may respectfully call you a fucking donkey.
Is the goal to keep the average temperature of earth as low as possible for as long as possible?
Human sustainability requires having those goals. Protecting oligarch wealth is within oligarch corruption power, and human prosperity is a sacrifice they are willing to make. Genocide of the uppity disenfranchised as a final solution seems natural today., as the path forward.
Don't despair! If we keep at it for long enough, we might destroy the AMOC (Atlantic Current), which might mean much lower temperature in Europe and North America, and much higher temperatures in the equator.
So you might not see snow in winter, but you'll probably get ice sheets in New York and Paris
Our mass cowardice, mine included, is our shame and culpability.
Like the German citizens who weren't Nazis but stayed quiet and didn't protest, only on a global scale. We should all be Greta, getting arrested doing the right thing, but again cowardice in the face of inhumanity is our sin.
I see so many people thinking that this isn't going to be a problem for them because they are thinking of heaters and AC and also that they'll probably die while it's still livable.
But meanwhile they put kids on this world, who will call our generations the worst people to have ever existed.
Despite what capitalism would have you believe, humans are part of nature. With the same effort that has allowed us to destroy nature faster than any other species, we can maintain or restore balance better than any other species. It makes as much sense to argue against the next generation of humans to "restore the ecosystem" as it makes sense to argue against the next generation of bees.
Let them call us, those born in the 20th century, the worst people to have ever existed. It's not far from the truth. But why let that stop us from doing the right thing: giving birth to them so they can fix this mess for future generations or die trying? Why let our shame deny the ecosystem the best chance at recovery?
With all the respect, Your argument feels just dogmatic. If we can solve the climate crisis, we must do it, not hope for someone else to. All this generational talk feels just like an excuse to keep the status quo. There's no magical generation coming to save the world, just people just like us.
Because living in a world with extreme weather events where you can't leave your house for weeks because of heat waves and never before seen storms, and possibly damage to your home(this has already happened where I live), where a home garden will die to heat waves, with constant shortages of food and water, is not a life I'd wish on my enemy, much less someone I love.
We are already starting to see more extreme heat waves and weather, we know it's happening, and we're drilling for more oil than ever, so the chances the next generation will suddenly start making big changes when the past two have done worse than nothing while being fully informed seems extremely unlikely to me. I'm pretty optimistic on most everything, but there is not a single sign pointing to this being resolved by humans within the next 100 years, if ever.
This is a genuinely nice sentiment, but it is worth noting that the world is way more populated than most past generations, and while any hope for us will fall largely on the squares of future generations, their job would be so much easier if there were a lot less of them.
Some developed countries seem to have this notion that declining birth rates will be the end of them and while that can be somewhat true for how economic systems are set up, the world was objectively a lot more sustainable before the boomers generation, population wise
Grim milestone and barely a peep about it in popular discourse. Everyone needs to prepare personally for the consequences.
For one thing I'm not expecting food prices to level off for the rest of my life. Everything's just going to get more scarce and expensive. Is it possible common foods we enjoy now we may never have again at some point?
On a lighter note. I got a new winter jacket in 2019. Between covid and the rapid decline of cold winters I've barely worn it.
Conservatives successfully turned it into a "politically sensitive" topic. A weatherman can't even bring it up without getting angry calls, but I can feel them biting their tongue when discussing things like ocean heat content.
Yes, the line is going up. That's good, right? Shareholders keep telling me that the line must go up, and it looks like we're doing it! Good job, everyone.
True exponentials are rare in nature. Things can look exponential in the short term but are really logistic.
Look at it this way: if the atmosphere gets hot enough it’ll boil off into space and then the earth will cool back down again due to the loss of greenhouse effect.
Sitting here in a beautiful sunny day, people can be forgiven for thinking its not a big deal.
Until you realise how much energy it takes to raise the temperature of the ocean and land by 1.5. And then that all that energy goes into every weather event forever until we reverse it.
It’s been twenty degrees F (11C) above average in Arizona this week. Should be frigid with snow on the ground (in the mountains) yet I was riding my bike with a t-shirt this week.